This past weekend, I finished Ken Burns' "Jazz" miniseries. 10 episodes, roughly 20 hours, covering the evolution of jazz from the mid-1800's through the early 1990's. I wrote about the first six episodes, here, and now that I've seen the whole thing, there's a bit more left to say about it.

First, I liked it, quite a bit. It dumps a seriously huge amount of information onto the viewer - much more that I could keep up with. I'm almost tempted to watch it again to make a list of musicians who caught my ear but whose names got lost because I just couldn't keep track of them all. And, again, the photography he used was amazing, and the old film clips he dug up were great to see. So, overall, very good.

But I come here not to praise Ken Burns' "Jazz", but to complain about it. Because that's what I do.

Latin jazz? In the 7th or 8th installment, Burns mentions that Dizzy Gillespie had a couple of Latin-flavored songs in the 50's. And he says something about how that is a precursor to the Latin jazz sound that would appear later. And then there's a couple of minutes on the collaboration between Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto, and how they introduced the Brazilian bossa nova beat to American jazz. But he does this without even mentioning the one song Getz and Gilberto did which almost everybody knows. Even if you don't know anything about jazz, or Getz, or Gilberto, or bossa nova, you probably know this song: "The Girl From Ipanema". Why pass up the chance to use a song everybody already knows as an example of the form ? Why would he pass up the chance to connect what he's talking about with what the listener likely already knows? A mystery. An even bigger mystery: that is the last you hear of Latin jazz. He doesn't come back to it. Doesn't mention it again.

For that matter, except for Django Reinhardt, I don't think he mentions any non-American jazz musicians or styles. This probably has a lot to do with one of his major themes: jazz is an American art form. He (and his guest speakers) hammer that nail deep into the viewer's head. It's repeated over and over. Jazz Is American! It's American! American! OK! OK! I get it! But still, can't we just accept that it was invented here and then acknowledge the eventual contributions of non-Americans? No. Because that wouldn't fit with another theme of his: jazz itself is what it means to be American. Playing jazz is a metaphor for American democracy, for issues of race, for the "melting pot", for all kinds of other American™ things. Can't be mixing foreign agents into that gumbo ! Oh no.

Armstrong and Ellington and Marsalis. The first two are Burns' two main characters in the series. They are in all of the episodes, are the focus of many long segments, and the arc of Burns' narrative follows their lives. Jazz takes off with them; peaks in the 30s when they do (and so we get 3 episodes on the 30s); jazz begins to lose popularity as they do in the 50s; and finally, in the mid-70's when both of them pass, Burns all but declares jazz dead. The last episode covers 1961 onward, and spends a lot of time on their final days. Now, Wynton Marsalis is one of the guest commentators, and he's pretty good at it: entertaining, smart, seems well informed, etc.. Marsalis is also the guy who - according to Burns (who's never afraid of superlatives) - pretty much single-handedly resurrected jazz when he showed up on the scene in the 80s. Hey look, Marsalis is here! And suddenly jazz sprouts up from dormancy and shoots off in a thousand new directions! As soon as Marsalis appears! Just like that! Maybe. I dunno. But it seemed a bit overstated, and more than a bit odd that someone who had contributed so much commentary to the series should also be praised so highly by the series.

Jazz is an island. Aside from a brief (and dismissive) bit about Miles Davis' early jazz/rock fusion records, there was also no mention of the hybrids jazz has formed with other genres. This seemed like another place where Burns missed an opportunity to connect his subject to something viewers might already know about. He could have spent a few minutes showing how 70's bands like Steely Dan fused jazz and rock: they even played Ellington songs, and they took part of a Horace Silver song and turned it into the piano part on "Rikki Don't Lose That Number"; and how Joni Mitchell moved from folk rock to jazz-rock to straight jazz in the space of a decade. Or how the Allman Brothers fused not only rock and blues, but added jazz and country music to the mix, too. Or how a little bit of jazz and prog rock got mixed up with bluegrass to form "newgrass". Or how the "jam bands" of the 70s took inspiration from people like John Coltrane when they did their 30 minute improvisations. Or how the solo on The Byrds' "Eight Miles High" was explicitly modeled on John Coltrane's playing. And on and on. There's so much Burns could have done to better connect with viewers who might know a lot about rock but not a lot about jazz.

But the reason he didn't, I suspect, is because he really doesn't like the direction jazz took in the 60's and 70's. He doesn't care about what happened in the 70's because it wasn't traditional jazz. Just by noting on the amount of time the series spend on each decade, it's easy to see that Burns likes the pure, acoustic, jazz of the 20's through the 50's: Armstrong, Ellington, Billy Holiday, Benny Goodman, etc.. You don't see the 50's until episode #8, and then episode #10 covers the 60's through 90's. And so, when Burns give Marsalis credit for resurrecting jazz in the 80's, it's not because Marsalis brought something really new, or outside, or foreign, to jazz; he didn't take it an exciting new direction. It's because Marsalis really just brought back the old traditions. He brought back the jazz that Burns likes most.

Or, shorter me: Ken Burns made a series about the things he likes and they're not exactly the same as the things I like.

Bwahhhh!!!